having
gratuitous grief inflicted upon us.'

'But you would not have wished that "Romeo and Juliet" should have ended
happily, or that Othello should have discovered the perfidy of his
Ancient in time to prevent all fatal consequences?'

'I am not afraid to go so far as that,' said the old lady. 'Shakespeare
is not everybody, and I am sure that thousands of people who have seen
those plays would have driven home more cheerfully afterwards if by some
contrivance the characters could all have been joined together
respectively. I uphold our anonymous author on the general ground of her
levity.'

'Well, it is an old and worn argument--that about the inexpedience of
tragedy--and much may be said on both sides. It is not to be denied that
the anonymous Sappho's verses--for it seems that she is really a
woman--are clever.'

'Clever!' said Ladywell--the young man who had been one of the shooting-
party at Sandbourne--'they are marvellously brilliant.'

'She is rather warm in her assumed character.'

'That's a sign of her actual coldness; she lets off her feeling in
theoretic grooves, and there is sure to be none left for practical ones.
Whatever seems to be the most prominent vice, or the most prominent
virtue in anybody's writing is the one thing you are safest from in
personal dealings with the writer.'

'O, I don't mean to call her warmth of feeling a vice or virtue exactly--'

'I agree with you,' said Neigh to the last speaker but one, in tones as
emphatic as they possibly could be without losing their proper character
of indifference to the whole matter. 'Warm sentiment of any sort,
whenever we have it, disturbs us too much to leave us repose enough for
writing it down.'

'I am sure, when I was at the ardent age,' said the mistress of the
house, in a tone of pleasantly agreeing with every one, particularly
those who were diametrically opposed to each other, 'I could no more have
printed such emotions and made them public than I--could have helped
privately feeling them.'

'I wonder if she has gone through half she says? If so, what an
experience!'

'O no--not at all likely,' said Mr. Neigh. 'It is as risky to calculate
people's ways of living from their writings as their incomes from their
way of living.'

'She is as true to nature as fashion is false,' said the painter, in his
warmth becoming scarcely complimentary, as sometimes happens with young
persons. 'I don't think that she has written a word